Children have
always had their role to play in society. They have always had
their place in the mind of adults who have projected onto them
their own fantasies and world views. Childhood has not always
been, for all that, an object of historical inquiry. Even though
people have expressed an interest in children since Antiquity
through treatises on morality, medicine, and pedagogy, childhood
truly became a special topic of investigation only after 1960
with the publication of Philippe Ariès pioneering volume,
Centuries of Childhood (in French : L’Enfant
et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime). Although
now subject to challenge on several points, this book remains
a landmark. Even though one tends to relativize the importance
of the eighteenth century in changing people’s mentalities—the
Middle Ages also had their part to play in the invention of childhood—the
family changed appreciably with the coming of the Age of Enlightenment
: education became more attentive, and better adapted, to the
child’s unique personality—as is testified to by the
success of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s L'Émile
in 1762.
The decline in mortality rates and progress in both medicine and
childcare at the end of the nineteenth century were going to give
rise to new hopes. The young person who had formerly been viewed
above all as a voracious and dangerous miniature adult would then
be seen in a new light. Educational institutions followed suit,
and it is in this context, too, that the unprecedented notion
of children’s art came to the fore in the twentieth century:
liberal schools employed it in their quest to free the child (Freinet,
Montessori, Decroly). This was also the moment when artists in
search of the childhood of art discovered the power of children’s
drawing, alongside the drawings of “madmen” and “primitives”;
indeed, it was the time when one put into practice Baudelaire’s
statement, “Genius is but childhood rediscovered at will.”
The various avant-garde movements were going to make sweeping
use of it in their struggle against conventions, materialism,
and learned culture. Their neoprimitivism approached the taste
for purity normally associated with monks. The child became a
key tool, and his spontaneous art was going to be copied, commented
upon, and exhibited. The psychologist would take care of the rest,
studying, classifying, indexing, and establishing some order where
others were above all enamored of chaos and pure instinct. The
teacher oscillated between these two assessments, training children
while also encouraging their free expression, caught as he was
between the model advocated by modern artists and the one developed
by the psychologists.
Before showing
an interest in representations of childhood, Emmanuel Pernoud
published a pioneering book on the subject itself, writing on
“the invention of children’s drawing (L’Invention
du dessin d’enfant [Hazan, 2003]). Camille Saint-Jacques
responds to him as a mindful artist who sees in adults’
reproduction of children’s drawing the rejection of culture,
therefore of an unprecedented but indispensable difficulty. The
debate remains up in the air, for this is to go against the reaction
of numerous contemporary artists who are responding to the myth
of the childhood of art spread since the Romantic Era by caricaturing
their own role as backward children. All the better to rid oneself
of it in a society that has become infantile and infantilizing,
says Pernoud, seeing a spiritual father in Alfred Jarry, the genius
doodler who, with all his might, rejected model children.
